Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought.

Yes it is. Some details and fancying out aside, the whole UI model is very similar to Windows (and with good reason - in the regions which can be largely described as the cradle of KDE, Macs generally hardly existed back then, it was basically all about Windows).
Just look how it started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_Beta3.png - and it didn't drastically change since then.

Though I wouldn't really call that "some serious issues" - it certainly helped adoption, what they aimed at with such similar look (I know of few uni computer labs, of web cafe kind & at non-technical departments, which used KDE largely because of that similarity)